Machine-Learning-Enabled Intrusion Detection System for Cellular Connected UAV Networks

The recent development and adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is due to its wide variety of applications in public and private sector from parcel delivery to wildlife conservation. The integration of UAVs, 5G, and satellite technologies has prompted telecommunication networks to evolve to provide higher-quality and more stable service to remote areas. However, security concerns with UAVs are growing as UAV nodes are becoming attractive targets for cyberattacks due to enormously growing volumes and poor and weak inbuilt security. In this paper, we propose a UAV- and satellite-based 5G-network security model that can harness machine learning to effectively detect of vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. The solution is divided into two main parts: the model creation for intrusion detection using various machine learning (ML) algorithms and the implementation of ML-based model into terrestrial or satellite gateways. The system identifies various attack types using realistic CSE-CIC IDS-2018 network datasets published by Canadian Establishment for Cybersecurity (CIC). It consists of seven different types of new and contemporary attack types. This paper demonstrates that ML algorithms can be used to classify benign or malicious packets in UAV networks to enhance security. Finally, the tested ML algorithms are compared for effectiveness in terms of accuracy rate, precision, recall, F1-score, and false-negative rate. The decision tree algorithm performed well by obtaining a maximum accuracy rate of 99.99% and a minimum false negative rate of 0% in detecting various attacks as compared to all other types of ML classifiers.